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Tag: AI

A concept which has captured Human imagination for decades, is the possibility of life on other planets, presumably orbiting other stars, than our own Sun. And the first, obvious question people might ask is, ‘If aliens – i.e., ETs – exist, which Solar System – i.e. Star – might they be living on?’ as well as ‘Have they in fact, ever traveled to our solar system?’ What I’d like to do with this posting, is to direct my own thinking sideways, into a mode more speculative, than anything I normally blog about: ‘What culture / societal / ideological ordering might they have, if they exist at all, through which they would judge our society?’

And I’d just like to point out a brief observation, about reported alien abductions: The people who were abducted, at least according to initial reports in the 1970s etc., seemed to detail being taken into rooms on-board spacecraft, which were remarkably devoid of controls. In the 1970s, our aircraft and other platforms had many instruments, buttons, dials, switches and so forth, consistently with our own level of technology, or due to our lack of technology, which prevented us from having glass cockpits, as we do today. And I can really think of only two possible reasons, why the abduction reports would be different in this detail:

No abductions may actually have taken place, and the people reporting them may have had little imagination, as to what the future, or the inside of a spaceship is supposed to look like, or

The aliens live in bare rooms, that don’t have levers, buttons, switches, etc.. They may have illuminated surfaces though, that are more than just illuminated surfaces…

A question which I’ve recently stumbled in to, is whether computer face recognition should be based on some sort of Fourier Transform of an image, which also refers to spatial frequencies, or on the Photometric placement of key features belonging to the face in 3D.

This photometric analysis of geometries was once referred to as ‘Photo-Modeling’, or, ‘Photo-Grammetry’.

There is a good chance that either method of face recognition can be made to work. But in the case of the photometric approach, there are two caveats which I don’t see news sources as mentioning:

Photometrics requires a fairly high-resolution image of one face, while the methods based on spatial frequencies can work with low resolutions and poor-quality images,

AFAIK, In order for photometrics to proceed in a completely automated way, footage or images of the subject need to be recorded, from at least three camera-positions, preferably in such a way that the lighting matches exactly. In this regard, modeling points that belong to the face is similar today to how it was a few decades ago, when a Hollywood Laser needed to paint grid-lines on the face, but is possible today without the grid-lines.

Hence, if a group has in fact used photometrics on a face, because they had 3 camera-positions, they’d also be in a position to display only one of the camera-positions, with the required points being positioned automatically. If the group presents the resulting overlay by itself, they may be confusing some viewers by omission.

In other words, the subject could be asked to look directly at one camera-position, that is obvious to him, but there could have been two additional camera-positions, that he was not aware of.

(Updated 09/15/2018, 17h35 … )

(As of 09/06/2018 : )

Alternatively, I am aware that ‘3D Cameras’ exist, which obtain a depth-map of the scene in front of them, due to an additional laser-emitter, that has been positioned in a way offset from the main camera axis.